God no. Pummeling defenseless bots in an AIR COMBAT mode is not a good way to decide the outcome. We are here for PvP not PvE. As it currently stands, air RB is a brainrot festival where the premium aircraft grind and is generally skilless. I would NOT like to see this made even worse by killing bots becoming the main objective.
Because this is an air combat mode. There is a place for these aircraft in the game, it is called GROUND RB. As people have been saying aout the A-10 and such, they are intended to be ground attackers, not meta defining threats in an air battle mode.
With most of the playerbase just bombing, being premium aircraft and unskilled pilots, teamwork will not end up working. In current air RB, having a team that works together is extremely rare and only ever happens in the very late stages of the game.
Air RB. It is in the name what the objective is, being air combat.
Go to sim, this has already been violently shot down in another topic.
I took the effort to defeat all of my enemies. As all of the enemy players are defeated, i have won the game. I should not need to waste my time on useless objectives or leave the game and lose.
Go play sim if you dont want markers. Spotting is already bad enough.
They werent intended to be good for air combat. Go use them in ground or naval.
There is no connection. A6M5 is so overtiered because bad players attempt to turnfight it. F4U-1A is generally just piloted by very bad players who will attempt to turn with the first thing they see.
Markers are great for game health. Removing them just generally makes paying attention to large amounts of enemies even harder. This is also pretty huge in missile tiers, where removing spotting you screw over everything with bad/no radar or rwr.
I can kind of see the benefit of no markers, I personally really like it in GRB - well, most of the time. I’m mature enough to know this is a fringe case, but my eyesight is a bit fucked even with glasses, which only somewhat fix my nearsightedness. It’s a weird case since I’m not BLIND without them, in fact I can se relatively well for a decent enough distance, but it has funny issues in WT specifically - regardless of if I’m on my potato laptop that needs to run on ULQ or on my PC that can run the highest settings, I tend to not be able to see unmarked planes well unless they’re either skylining with high contrast (green plane blue sky) or literally within a kilometer of me and moving erratically - even then, a lot of the time I struggle spotting them and the only help is if I catch a glimpse of that white shit coming off the wings when you turn (English isn’t my native language, sorry).
It’s usually fine for me in GRB, it feels fair since engagements are close anyway and I have my ways to be competent if I hop into CAS, but in ARB I’d be damn near entirely incompetent because I can not see a damn thing. I’ve even had issues of mistaking point blank destroyed tanks for live ones in GRB - either I’m even more blind than I think and my brain is substituting what it think I SHOULD be seeing with what I’m, well, NOT, or my brain is otherwise completely fried. Either way, no markers in ARB would make me entirely useless, and your idea would be pointless if they were something you can toggle bc who the hell wouldn’t toggle them on, eyesight issues or no?
Sorry for the rant and bad formatting. Eyes are starting to, uh, idk itch or whatever. Dry ass mfrs. I might have to start buying eye drops. My left one even gets blurry sometimes so I’m just rushing to type this.
Honestly, its opinions like yours why the mode is in such a sorry state. Hell, it feels like I’m reading quotes from xBromanx or UnknownDistance again! An example of the former’s burned into my retinas:
“If I ever have to stop a dogfight I am having to go save/kill some xxxxing bot farmer or spacebar warrior, or lose the match, that is the day I uninstall War Thunder.”
If the mode had only fighters as playable machines and all attackers/bombers/dedicated bomber interceptors as AI-only setpieces varying from map to map, your idea would have actual merit.
And yet CAS is one of the most hotly-debated topics over in that mode. It gets spammed there because of opinions like yours causing the mode to rot and make it unplayable for them.
And any ability for fighters alone to auto-end the match means that CAS and Bombers can literally never matter no matter what gets changed for them in any other area. You say to “go take them to Ground,” but if you played that you would realize that fighter-bombers are far superior to all dedicated CAS platforms, and that barring the occasional Lancaster or Pe-8 all heavy bombers are utterly worthless there, going to infest Simulator EC where they are reviled there even more than CAS is Combined Ground.
I do not want to reinvent the wheel regarding flying my vehicles. Yes, spotting has some issues, and markers have classically been the excuse for NOT fixing them.
See what I said above - fighter-bombers are leagues superior to dedicated CAS/Bombers in both modes due to superior speed and maneuverability.
There actually is - if that Zero can’t so easily see the Corsair coming, the Corsair can inflict a mortal wound on the Zero before the Zero can react. Or the Corsair could fly fast at ground level blending in against the ground to come up underneath the Zero, something red idiot markers do not allow.
Thus on average, fast speed-oriented planes would get higher K/Ds and higher BRs, while turnfighters would see lower K/Ds and lower BRs.
No, they really aren’t. What they are “good” for is a seemingly low barrier of entry from AB, and a lame excuse to not fix dot spotting differences between different graphics settings. That’s it.
Also for the argument of radar & RWR-equipped planes, planes with bad/no radar/RWR probably shouldn’t even be fighting one another to begin with.
I’ll say it again - if fighters were all that were supposed to matter in Air RB, we wouldn’t have playable CAS and Bombers in the mode at all. It was the complaints of folk like yourself which got us to this point at all BR ranges, and unresolved crap from low BRs has reached a boiling point in higher BRs with multiroles.
Yet, you, like everyone else, deserves to have fun in the game. Hence why I arrived at the objective setup overhaul that I did - you still get to have your dogfights without being interrupted by CAS/Bombers ending the round early. CAS/Bombers meanwhile don’t have their fun ended early by you finishing your dogfights, either.
Markers are being used as an excuse to not resolve serious problems with dot rendering and spotting, especially when using different graphics levels.
As things stand, it’s actually easier to spot dots on ULQ than it is in higher graphics settings. DCS once had the same problem, and only fixed it by making dots scale universally in size with graphics settings.
With dot rendering dealt with, markers would genuinely not be needed.
I’m not sure how a gamemode where i can enjoy fighter gameplay is a bad thing? Again why am i playing AIR BATTLES to kill bots and not actual human players?
Because as usual, lord snail can’t balance anything.
How does my opinion on air RB relate to ground???
Because like i said, low BR, bad pilots. They will try to turn with anything. Gaijin balances based on a vehicles efficiency in battle, and when you have lots of trash pilots and few good ones, stats are skewed to the lower end.
Aha, so my F-104S ASA at 11.3 can just eat shit and die? oh well… Markers are also especially important in missile tiers, ESPECIALLY when AIM-9M and AAM-3 comes into play. 16 vs 16 also absolutely kills any possibility of removing markers. MAYBE just MAYBE massive backlash in Spanish’s thread about changing markers is now hidden.
Good. It is an air superiority mode. I’m tired of seeing perfectly good fighter aircraft rocketing and bombing bases. Waste of team slots, just useless players who will do nothing and die. Furthermore, where is the fun in spawning, blowing up a base, dying and repeating? These pilots who bomb only learn to bomb, meaning when they make it to rank 8, they are bombing in an F-16.
It isn’t inherently bad - what is bad is your desire to “take all the stuff I don’t like, and PUSH IT SOMEHWERE ELSE!”
It seems to me that you have been brainwashed by the idea of “anything they gain is something I lose.” I do understand where this comes from - we all remember the days of bomber airfield rushes, and on some old maps attacker rushes still work with certain planes, to the detriment of fighter mains wanting dogfights. Meanwhile for all the rest of the attackers and bombers, fighters winning their dogfight (almost always a single hairball parked overtop of the only ground units on the entire map or in close enough proximity) means bombers and attackers, if they achieved anything at all, is rendered meaningless since “no active players on hostile team” bleeds tickets to zero regardless.
Breaking that idiotic objective setup and win conditions fueling that mentality is precisely the entire point of my aforementioned objective overhaul. Each of the three objectives bleeds 50% of the tickets at most. Best 2 of 3 wins.
Fighter pilots like yourself get to duke it out with other fighter pilots. CAS and Bombers do their thing. Each doing their respective jobs doesn’t automatically prevent the other from doing theirs. Fighters killing the enemy planes would take half the tickets, and bombers + attackers would be expected to take the other half. Quite literally everyone benefits.
Now tell me, in a purely objective sense (aka no “skill” arguments), is there anything wrong with a setup like that?
I am not sure how you don’t understand that fighter gameplay is still the core of our suggestions.
While I don’t agree with everything @GoneToTheAether said, I agree with them that we have serious problems in ARB.
Because you are pushing for completely removing strike aircraft from ARB, thus the only place they can play is GRB, further ruining that gamemode??? I think that GRB sucks because of CAS. If we fix ARB so that all aircraft are usefull in air realistic battles maybe we can fix GRB next.
Which is universally accepted to be a bad balancing technique.
Couldn’t be further from the truth. It would be called Fighter realistic battles in that case.
Have you read our original suggestion? It would make it so that bombing is not useless as you say. It would give people who like these planes and this playstyle an actual place in ARB. They wouldn’t be second class citizens anymore.
I don’t think people who do that are having that much fun. That’s what we are trying to fix that. They are probably grinding to reach top tier, in hopes there is fun to be had there. Can you blame them? The grind is atrocious.
In case you’re wondering, I (try to) enjoy all types of planes - fighters, attackers, bomber-killers, and bombers. All my reforms stem from 1) wanting all of them to be able to matter and 2) curbing abusive usage of certain examples that are obnoxious towards everyone else.
There was a time years ago I felt so aggrieved towards “toxic fighter mains” that I wanted to unilaterally flip the scales and make fighters be as worthless to winning matches as heavy bombers currently are, but a few years ago I realized that such a thing would never happen and would only ensure the mess keeps perpetuating for all time.
Hence why I now vouch for changing objectives so that each group doing their thing doesn’t have to step on the toes of the other two nearly as much, so the others can do theirs too.
This is mainly what I disagree with you on. I think we can better design the gamemode so that such “toxic behavior” is not the best course of action. I believe you are jumping the gun with “0.1x for actions outside your role” and similar.
Counterpoint, and I see this a lot in Ground RB - without markers, people simply don’t know that they’re about to pull up on a Zero and will full send the fight, which will inevitably result in their demise.
This is especially true if they’re in a decently agile plane like a Yak or Spitfire.
I understand, and I admit I was probably getting a little frustrated by you not understanding earlier.
Do you have any other ideas that seem realistic for snail to implement to help resolve this?
Problem airspawn-abusing bombers could certainly be lowered to the attacker spawn, as frankly Helldivers and Co. were naval equivalents of attackers. As could Pe-2s, B-25s, the PV-2D, etc. Anything with forward guns in significant quantity.
Part of why I still stand by the idea of reward coercion to help solve such behavior for good is that even IF just the “bonuses” for doing your intended job were implemented, I would not be surprised at all if later regular economy updates saw base RP & SL multipliers reduced across the board to compensate, effectively producing the same result in a sneaky way that would leave a very bad taste in everyone’s mouths, some shouting “conspiracy” this or that. As controversial as my suggestion is, at least I’m up-front about the tradeoff…
As do I. I am able to use both speed-centric & maneuver-centric planes equally well in Combined modes. If I come across something I cannot outmaneuver, I extend away in a shallow dive.
Surprise matters more than “hold camera-stare-backward/target tracking cam:enemy button while facerolling on keyboard to prevent enemy gun solution” is why I think it leads to much better air combat, more engaging fights in general, and less third-partying in said fights.
Surprise matters more than “hold camera-stare-backward/target tracking cam:enemy button while facerolling on keyboard to prevent enemy gun solution” is why I think it leads to much better air combat, more engaging fights in general, and less third-partying in said fights.
I absolutely agree. Using the P-51 or P-47 feels way better in GRB. For me at least.
What we have focused in our original post is high tier, where there are no airspawns (well either everyone gets them or no one does). For low tiers I would also remove airspawns for stirke aircraft/attackers. Strike aircraft and attackers that can function well as fighters have no reason to have an airspawn, and this does lead to abuse.
The problem lies in that if these ground pounders (that are actually ground pounding) want to ground pound they can’t do it with fighters flying around them. So Gaijin gave them airspawns so that they can reach their targets before they get intercepted.
I would make it so that such aircraft go after their fighter teammates and can go in for their targets only after their leading fighters have achieved air superiority in front of them.
I made a quick mockup. Thick lines in the backs are airfields, crosses are bomb/strike targets, arrows are fighters and crossed arrows are strike aircraft.
Here’s how team distribution would look like before any merges. Let’s focus on the left third of the battle field.
If our fighters lose strike aircraft can divert and support a nearby group. In our mode taking out all targets would require multiple flyouts anyway, since we imagine we would have respawns.
Here’s how that could look like. Notice that the blue arrow on the left is gone, indicating that blue fighters lost.
We are playing planes that were designed for war.
We need BIG maps, big enough to the point that you need to fly high to avoid running out of fuel.
We need proper objectives. Preferably a front line, with ground targets, long range SAMS, SEAD and multiple bases. Moving front line,
We need longer games, 20 min is not REALISTIC. NOT EVEN ENOUGH TIME TO CLIMB.
We need AWACS
This has all been done in DCS years ago. Just copy it and make a light version. We don’t need to air refuel and fly for hours, but it’s a bit ridiculous right now.
Devs I beg you, make it REALISTIC so the name fits.
imagine using helis to ressuply SAMS on the front
imagine using strike aircraft to hunt the enemies SAMS,
imagine using SAMS and SPAA on an actual front to protect AI from strike aircraft
imagine playing a tank in an actual platoon
imagine flying CAP wiht a fighter and doing BVR
imagine flying helis at treetop to get behind enemy lines to hunt logistics
imagine playing an AWACS
the possibilities are endless and the potential is infinite. But here we spawning 50km from each other and fur balling like brain dead bots for 5 min praying to god that you get a kill before the furball consumes you
That I can get behind, though what you’re describing already exists in the form of Enduring Confrontation.
Of course, even in EC, matches still rather stupidly automatically end when one team has no players left on it, which is the core reason nonfighters have remained either useless or “overpowered” with no middle ground.
Yes, current EC maps and missions suck. It’s the same as normal mid sized maps for the most part. It might be slightly better because teams can spread out more, and bombers can go and bomb in peace, but it is more of the same.
Great idea, haven’t thought of that one. Could be limited to utility helicopters so that attack helis don’t steal that objective since they are faster. Not like these is much room in attack helis for cargo anyway.
Objectives in games exist for one reason: To force players to encounter other players, and have a fight. That’s it.
Whether this is AI units or bomb bases in Air RB, or cap circles in Ground, or caps/convoys in Naval, it’s all the same. A light with which to attract the moths that are players. This is the core of all PvP game design. Domination or Hardpoint in CoD, Capture the Flag or Oddball in Halo, or any other example, it’s all the same thing.
I enjoy flying all aircraft types, but any time I see a suggestion that boils down to “I want to PvE without being interrupted”, it’s something that can simply be tossed out. Because that’s contrary to the core design intent of a PvP game.
